Plausible Deniability
by Mithrigil
Summary: [Suikoden III] Masks hide more than faces, romance is more than intrigue, and the noble art of Strategy applies to more than war.


**Plausible Deniability**

**_a brief foray into Genso Suikoden III_**

_by Mithrigil Galtirglin_

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The music of Iluya, these days, bears more resemblance to the ship than to the ocean. It is built from the inside out, planned on vast sheets of pastel paper with pages and pages of notes detailing process and expense. Time was, the musicians would improvise on the most rudimentary of themes--a pulse, a speed, a key, perhaps a rhythm--and the people would dance however they saw fit. Those days ended when the Rune cannons returned, legal after two decades of protest and four times as deadly now that that the best Runic minds in the Federation no longer had to operate out of caves and ditches. It is a time of expansion and precision and My Island Over All, and even though oars are a thing of the past, there is still a need to pound out the strokes.

Dance, similarly, has followed the music out of the rain-soaked fields and into the castles, from the thread to the circle to the line. The rain, after all, makes the sheet-music hard to read and even harder to preserve. These days, ideally, everything is preserved, and that which cannot be preserved is recreated to the best of its verisimilitude. As for that which can neither be preserved nor recreated, well, the dominant belief is that it was probably not fit to exist in the first place. Iluya has taken the rhythm of the sea and the wash of the tide and measured them, impressing the power of nature with the indelible mark of man.

The dance, right now, is a waltz, faster than a music-box but slower than a waterwheel. The masked and gowned and high-collared figures weave from the columns of shadow and the sumptuous curtains and doors into the stark light of the dance floor itself. The women--or those dancing the roles of women tonight, as this _is_ a Masquerade--change hands like stolen property, with all the thrill and back-sprang that implies, and those styled as men receive whomever the music dictates they receive. On this floor, apparently, a good time is had by all.

But the pleasures of a Masquerade are not derived from dancing alone. They are derived from the darkness that encroaches on and follows the dancing, the shadows between folds of cloth and stiff-wrought leather, the sky between thunderclaps, and the obfuscation, for this night alone, of identity. Not that none in attendance are recognizable by other than their faces--indeed, some are more easily identified by the masks they wear--but it is not a night for anonymity. The Masquerade is a time of willful disregard, brief exogamies of the mind and loins, and plausible deniability to all but yourself that you stood fully behind your decisions.

Ilana is masked as a crow. The black feathers, which are actually Nasal and dyed, arch high and sharp over her forehead, and one long plume juts out and curls under her chin. Her beak is gold and not as obtrusive nor prominent as it could be--short enough that, on a man, it would not provoke a certain type of witticism--and the eye-holes are set with a perimeter of black pearls, most of them natural. She and her husband, Lord Reylan of Kooluk, had commissioned their masks from separate artists for this year's ball, hers the more expensive. Her hair is now dyed at the temples to cover the beginnings of grey, a dark and stiff red, the patriotic hue of cannon fire on its way through wood, and tumbles deceptively youthful down her back in curls. Her husband loves her hair and how it curls, the way her first husband did not. She is tall, taller than some of the men, as tall as her husband. She often wears low shoes to hide this, though her husband jokes about it to his friends. That is not the case tonight.

Tonight, she is a giantess, for a crow, her rake-thin and vertical frame tenuously balanced on heels like tentpegs or daggers, and does not know how to dance. Here she tries, and her turn sends her into the arms of whichever partner. She laughs, the almost entirely internal sound lost under the music and in the frailty of her sinewy chest, and catches up with the steps as best she can. Not one of the hundreds of aristocrats present notices nor cares, and none of the servants or bodyguards are concerned about this woman, unspectacular even with her lavish mask and deep blue-black, full-skirted gown. No matter the lengths to which one makes oneself a spectacle tonight, he is lost in the crowd. Everyone is exalted, and thus even the ascent is cheapened.

She finds the beat again, and catches the proper gloved hand in her proper gloved hand. Her new partner is styled as some sort of fish, with scales that catch the golden candles and pervert the light into greenness like the moss and mildew of the cave she would sneak into as a little girl. Perhaps this man was something her father and sisters would have similarly disapproved of, if the sheen of his mask's scales says anything about the man underneath. But all that the mask says is what the man wants it to say, and Ilana nods politely and him and goes about the waltz, caring more about her heels than her leader in the dance. This new partner carries himself like a soldier-sailor, and perhaps he is one when he is not wearing the mask, but that matters nothing to Ilana as he spins her toward the next male-role dancer in the line, only four steps and a falter after they came together at all.

There is no announcer at a Masquerade. There is only a fool at the door to the grand hall, a story and then some higher than the dance floor, with a wicked smile on his leather-pated face and a Thunder Rune under his glove. He watches the entrants, recognizes most of them even behind their feathers and jewels, and those he does not recognize he speaks with for a spell. Once the harlequin-guard ascertains that these guests are not here to raze the island or loot the manor, he lets them go about their purveyal of illusion and goes back to trying to pierce everyone else's. The harlequin-guard is not smiling behind the massive grin painted on his leathern face; he concentrates intently on the eyes and chins and carriage of the entrants, as he has been instructed to by the lord of this Island.

The eyepatched jackrabbit is old Doctor Kessler, from Nay. He comes alone, without even servants. His wife is only recently dead. The "Harmonian Bishop", whose infulae are altogether too long, is Master Maredger. The boy is barely old enough to be here, but his father does as he pleases. The presumably popinated pair in just now entering is Madame Hindesy and her lady-in-waiting, though which of them has the upper hand tonight, the harlequin-guard cannot tell. They are dressed as Calerian dancers, with veils instead of masks, not that anything short of cold iron could keep the women's eyes from locking onto each other like jousters in the lists.

The harlequin-guard lets them pass, watches them disappear down the curling, carpeted staircases, and glances down at the floor full of self-indulgent fantasy. These are the tamest in attendance, these dancers and musicians, at least for now. These keep their clothing on as well as their masks, breathe rather than whisper sweet nothings, drink rather than shout curses, feint rather than fight. He has no idea why he is watching this space, when all of the danger and intrigue would surely be elsewhen and elsewhere.

Another coterie of guests enters behind him, and the harlequin-guard turns back to his post. It is three men, this time, two in black, a shark and a dragon, and the third a serpent in white and emerald, in a streamlined coat that is no doubt meant to fill the gaps age has left in his torso. The guard sorts through his memory and places faces to the masks.

All three men are very tall, even among Islanders, and the dark ones taller than the third. The garb of the dark ones is simple but not identical from man to man--the shark carries only one sword, across his back, the dragon carries two smaller ones, and furthermore each man's slight shoulder-armor is in a shape more attuned to that of his respective mask. The shark shows no hair from under his helmet-like mask, and is the largest and broadest of the three, which is only augmented by the black-painted fins jutting out from his loose-cloth shoulders. The dragon is slighter and has fair hair of a frightening length, hanging over his ridge-winged collar in a plain braid, and the visible lower half of his face is rather unsettling.

That braid the harlequin-guard remembers, and from it concludes that the third man, the white serpent, is Albert Silverberg, a dignitary and strategist from Toran who is currently advising some Iluyan lord or other. A quick glance at the deep, wine-red hair peeking out from under the base of the mask more or less confirms that guesswork, and further consideration of the white serpent's bearing, cane, and attire only supports the notion. After all, the ball is not about disguising yourself, just claiming that you did. The mask's lacquer is as shifty as the interior of an oyster-shell and about the same color from scale to scale, and the apparent eyes--in a captivating and warning glare, like petty thievery--are two emeralds the size of a brawler's thumbnails. The actual eyeslits on the mask--and on the masks of his two black-clad attendants--are almost indistinguishable from the masks themselves. The shark's eyes are hidden in his gills, the dragon's in his nostrils--and such detail, that those nostrils are rimmed in bilious ash!--and Lord Silverberg's in the gaping and long-fanged snout of the snake-head that covers nearly all of his own. On all three men, only the base of their noses, their lips, and their chins are exposed at all, and two of the three faces are thus inscrutable. The fair-haired dragon, though, wears a smirk in addition to two swords and a mask.

The harlequin-guard quickly appraises the visible weapons--all three swords have been peace-bonded with white cords, and Lord Silverberg himself is unarmed in the conventional sense--and lets the trio pass. He does not give the men a second thought, beyond the sound of Lord Silverberg's heavy white boots and silver cane as the next guests join the ball.

"Maggots," the smirking dragon-masked servant mutters. "Why do they even bother?"

Lord Silverberg stares over the railing to the wash of color on the dance-floor, resting his hands on the cane's head and the cane on the floor. "I would venture," he says, his voice low and unsettling between the bone-carved fangs of the snake-mask, "that their delusions of significance are both more pronounced and less justified than mine."

The servant scoffs, and turns away from the banister, the peace-bonds on his back-baldricked swords paling in the coal-toned light of the rune-lanterns and candelabras, a floor and then some below. The dragon-mask is dangerously horned, casting its jagged shadow every which way as the servant further appraises the setting. The other servant, the shark, takes his cue and does the same, but starts over the railing rather than back toward the entrance. He stands beside but an arm's length from his master and stone-facedly regards the crowd. "Are they yet here?" the shark asks, with some difficulty pronouncing the words that implies something physically wrong with his mouth.

Lord Silverberg nods, and directs his gaze to the first of the three relevant parties. It is a presumably-man in a headdress styled after the LeBuquean mantors and a long blue coat, being flirted with by two "Calerian Dancers" at the base of the stairs. The mantor-headdress does little to obscure the man's smile and the brown beard framing it, cut close to his chin. He is younger than Lord Silverberg, and it shows in his laxer posture and broader shoulders.

The second of the relevant parties is more difficult to indicate with a mere glance or gesture, as he is in motion, edging around the dance floor, probing for an opening, on the heels of his friend that "Harmonian Bishop". The boy is of an age for wild-oat-sowing but not marriage, if his weasel-like frailty makes any statement for his years and character. He is styled as a Grandfather Holly, with withered berries the same color as his hair adorning the ostentatious, groping branches at the top of his mask, stretching out contentiously as long as the dragon-servant's horns. Lord Silverberg indicates him to the shark with a general-area glance and the word, "tree".

"Doesn't look a thing like you," the dragon-servant says, the return of his smirk evident.

"You flatter me," Lord Silverberg replies, already having sought and pinpointed the third of the persons of actual import to him in this den of self-aggrandization.

"Perhaps I flatter the tree."

The comment elicits a brief smile from Lord Silverberg, fleeting as a stumble before the fall begins. "I thought your tastes ran more toward blood than wood."

In years prior, Lord Silverberg is sure, such a comment would have ascertained at least one of the dragon-servant's two swords being drawn, and another nasty scar in some ever-covered space on Lord Silverberg's skin. Now, though, with decades between them, Lord Silverberg is confident in his assessment of his "servant's" sense of humor, and knows that barbs of a pointed sexual nature matter not at all, and so he is free with them. So he edges along the balcony's rail toward the stairs, his skin quite whole, his silver cane in his hand and snake-mask over his face, and leaves the servants behind.

Both servants chuckle, and the shark asks on the heels of his laugh, "Proceed?"

"Proceed," Lord Silverberg answers, the sound barely carrying over his shoulder.

The dragon-servant, however, has other ideas, and a smirk fast replenishing itself on his darkly resonant chin. "Does the mate still look the way she used to?" he asks, nearly muses, before Lord Silverberg can step out of hearing range.

The white-clad lord stops with his cane resting on the stair one under him. "It is a Masquerade," he answers. "Yes."

On his way down the stairs, pages are turned, and the song and dance change accordingly. Ilana, as courtesy warrants, turns toward the musicians and applauds them before the next song can rightly begin. If she remembers the rules, she will know that this next dance is like the last, built from circles of alternating partners, easy to join even after the song has begun. And she will know that it is slower, more attentive that the prior, not a whirlwind as much as an insistent breeze, the kind of warning for rain that Iluyans have learned to always heed. She skitters on those unfamiliar heels to her place in line, her blue-black skirts thinning behind her until she stops, raises her hands, and tries to recall the steps.

She is not nearly as old nor as young as she feels. She will not likely last more than two more dances before her lungs begin to admonish her for trying. Her face is not wrinkled behind the crow-mask, but her hair and lips need aid to stay red, due to sickness and stress. She makes eye-contact with her partner through the black pearl-framed holes and smiles, more at herself than him. He is styled as a bull, though he is smaller than she, and his mask looks difficult to walk in, let alone dance.

Ilana does not care. She curtsies with the rest of her women's circle, and realizes that this song is also a waltz. The pulse is still faster than a music-box, still slower than a water-wheel, but much closer to the music box in this incarnation. She is standing straight a beat later than the others, but does not care, and approaches her partner, the bull, in a more-or-less timely fashion.

The dance, at this point, calls for a near-touch of both hands, and the partners circle each other in slow steps, almost as if to size each other up. After a half-circle, this reverses, and, still without a touch, they rotate back to where they had begun. There is a preparation forward, back to back, and a kneel on the part of the men, though the women merely bend. Ilana teeters on her heels emerging from that bend, and at the edge of the floor her son and his friend point and laugh. Ilana does not care--she is laughing as well. She circles the bull-masked man again, and catches her son's eyes as she glances off the dance floor. The young man is embarrassed, his cheeks as red as the withered berries in the branches of his mask. His friend stifles his own laughter as well.

Back in the circle, Ilana curtsies to dismiss her current partner and follows the line of women rotating to their next. Some of the women turn, displaying their dresses and adjusting their cleavage as they apprehend whomever they will be dancing these next few measures with. For Ilana it is a rather masculine butterfly, swagger-legged and ironic. She bursts out laughing--which makes her chest ache not a little--and nearly loses her footing. Blessedly, perhaps, this butterfly isn't a much better dancer than she and is too absorbed in his own feet to take her position into account. When they touch hands, it is more luck than strategy; when they circle each other, he is ahead of his place and she behind hers. But of course, the waltz is as constant and unimpressionable as the rain, and the subtle failings of the dancers are as relevant to the musicians as the disposition of the jellyfish in the ocean last week.

Her measures with the burly butterfly are over as quickly as they began, and again the circle, now a touch flattened and irregular, shifts. The next mask in line is a familiar face, the peacock-pated Michel D'Boule. She knows his father through her father, and remembers when the man bowing before her was a pale and scrawny imitation of his affluent, gay uncle. Her dancing is already clumsy at best, and her partners haven't helped her stop laughing.

At least Michel is a better leader than the butterfly, and at least he knows that Ilana herself is no longer built for grace. "Enjoying yourself as usual," he says, in a rhythm and color akin to the music. She smiles and agrees, on a weak beat. Her pass with him calms her somewhat, and his smile--under the feathers and beak--is not so ridiculous by the time she bids he go. As Michel turns to follow the male-role circle of masqueraders to their subsequent partners, Ilana is drawn to stare at the costume's frighteningly large fan-tail. She hadn't noticed when she and Michel were dancing that the feathers quite possibly had the surface area of a small couch and stretched a leg's length high and breadth thick.

This time the laughter that takes her starts silent and stays silent. She closes her eyes, which makes the folds of skin under her mask itch with makeup and sweat, and grins something ingenuous. Her right hand, gloved blue-black and still poised from the curtsy that concluded this pass, hovers and contorts into almost a talon, a perfect match for her crow-mask and redoubling posture. She moves to cover her mouth with her other hand despite the lack of sound she makes, and wavers on sharp heels against the scuffed and abused dance floor.

Her next partner takes her by the right wrist.

It is a strange gesture, she passively realizes, but not unfamiliar in the least. The man is holding her like a highball-glass, with one finger and one thumb right where her radius and humerus begin to part. She has nearly always felt that gesture between two layers of glove, and whenever there had been any less of a barrier it had hurt in a mostly-unpleasant way, like washing one's hands too soon after clipping the nails too close to the skin. With her eyes still closed she can see the other three fingers of the gloved hand holding her arm, curled like cross-sections of a breaking wave. She has looked down at the gesture and inferred--but never presumed to actually understand--its meaning several times in the past, from when it had been easier and socially acceptable for her to walk about in heels.

Her ex-husband is six-foot-three.

The waltz goes on and Ilana forgets to curtsy until she ends up bending by virtue of being pulled partway down when he bows. She is jostled into facing him when he raises his other hand to proceed as the dance prescribes. He was always the better dancer than she. How he stored the ages of steps in his head alongside half a world's politics and the intricacies of centuries of warfare, she had no idea. But then, Albert was renowned for nothing if not a swollen head.

He circles her, and she remembers not to let him about a measure into recovering. He is still holding onto her right wrist with his left hand, but their other hands are placed gingerly against each other as the steps ordain. She follows his clothing up his arm to his shoulders and face, and observes that he has also become frailer, which is more justifiable at his age than hers. She imagines that, under the starched coat and wide scarves, he is pale, and his scars are deeper, more recalcitrant, and even harder to explain. _White and green, for some reason,_ she wonders, _is he also now dreading the advent of grey?_ His hair is longer, still wine-red, and visible in his profile as a shadow of the mask. He is a snake, she realizes as he lets her wrist fall and they rejoin their circles. The skin under her glove rises back into place with a toddler's instinctive protest.

She stares at the mask and knows full well where he hid his eyes in it. The mask's expression is similar to the warning of the rain, the sheen of the white scales veined with shadows too caliginous to be grey and the emeralds of the mendacious eyes overcast. What little skin he displays is stark and expressionless, still maintaining a lamplight-flush that tenuously prevents him from being taken for the reanimate dead.

The next part of the dance calls for the men to kneel and the women to orbit them. Ilana watches her ex-husband sink to the dance-floor, and realizes that he is now carrying a cane. She notes--and smirks at noting--that rather than actually set his white-clad knee to the floor, he gives the appearance of kneeling but leans on the cane, as parasitically as she on her heels. She dances past him, looks down surreptitiously through the black-pearl holes in her mask, and sees the tremor and effort it takes for him to suspend his knee an inch off the floor. For a moment, she wishes that the music would reach a ritardando and she could stop and watch the torture, see how long an unathletic man of fifty can stave off actually kneeling. He holds the cane in both gloved hands, like a truly old man. To a woman, thirty-six and prematurely grey, with ailing lungs, this is justice.

She resumes her place in the women's circle and turns around--without faltering, she realizes a moment later--and he rises, not as gracefully as his animal counterpart, but not lacking his ubiquitous composure. He gathers himself to his full height and does not bow, holding the silver cane in his hands in an entirely different way than he would hold her wrist.

Because he does not bow, she does not curtsy, but nods politely, the lowest curling black feather of her mask nudging once into her chest. It would hurt to dance anymore, she knows, but there are two more partners in line designated for her.

Lord Silverberg moves with his line. His white-coated and green-scarved shoulders do not falter and the snake-mask does not look back. Ilana, belatedly, falls into step with her circle, on quarrelsome feet. She feels stronger, tighter, more like a statue, and for all she knows the only reason she isn't gasping for air was because her chest has transmuted itself to marble. A stone crow, she muses to herself as she nears the next man she is meant to dance with. A stone crow to break the teeth of any snake that tries to swallow it.

She curtsies to her partner with her eyes closed, then opens them in the general direction of someone else. She takes advantage of the regularity of the circle-dance, estimates where her ex-husband has gone, and looks there instead. Her dancing will suffer, but she knows it can't get much worse short of her actually keeling over. And she won't let herself do that, now that she knows he's here, so she is twice as careful rising from the curtsy as she has been all evening.

He has always been the better dancer. She is unsure whether he bowed to this new partner of his--a very young woman, in this case, a cat-masked, copper-clad, and rather voluptuous thing who probably would never be attracted to a man Albert's age, not for all the wine in Kanakan. He held the cane in his outer hand as he circled the girl, so much smaller than either of them--the cat-girl made eye-contact with the wrong part of his artificial face, and the matted cloth tail attached to the bustle of her dress swished--and kept his free gloved palm to hers. She saw light pass between the flats of their hands and realized that he was treating the girl like the floor--unfit for even his clothing.

It is like him, she thinks, her hip narrowly missing the humbled shoulder of her partner. It is like him to exploit his rescinded right to touch her, and deny even mandated courtesy to everyone else.

She rounds her partner and notices, on the outskirts of the ballroom floor, her son. The grappling branches of his mask block out whatever expression he is wearing underneath it. From the way the youth is standing, though, and his apparent disregard for the nonsense his friend the "Bishop" is spouting next to him, Ilana's estimate that the boy is at least _aware_ seems a fair one. The jeweled red berries hanging off his mask blink in the shadows everything around him casts, those changes the only thing that sets them apart from his hair. He has been growing it long and tying it back. It is curly like hers, dark red like his father's. A lot of what's his is like his father's; his hair, his posture, the company he keeps. Sometimes it seems to Ilana that the most ignoble nobles latch onto her son. Then again, he's not yet seventeen, and he will outgrow the crude company if he knows what's good for him, which he usually does.

"So the governor sent out an invitation to all of the people he knew or at least figured would be into this paphian stuff and told them he was having a party. And he added in that instead of currying for favors and everything, he wanted every person to come up with a kind of food to be licked off the bodies of his harem during foreplay. Anything, a dessert, a savory sauce, whatever floated their boats."

The waltz goes on. "It'll never end," Lucian says.

"And then the--what?" Maredger cuts his own story off and glances up at his friend the Grandfather Holly. "That wasn't at me, was it?"

"No," Lucian answers, swerving his head and tossing the branches from side to side in a way that makes how artificial they are obvious. He rolls up the sleeves of his bronze-grey coat so that his workroom-pale wrists are visible above his gloves. "Come on, I think they've gotten up more red wine by now."

Maredger tugs his Bishop's hat back into place and smirks approvingly. "You've got that stuff in your _veins,_ Loosh."

The tree-styled young man laughs--two short sounds, the first aspirated, the second inhaled and softer, followed by an actual intake of air through his nose. Now that his voice was just about done changing, that kind of laugh doesn't sound as silly as it used to.

"Must get it from your dad," Maredger offers, as they wind around the other spectators, toward the nearest of the display tables.

Lucian shakes his branches again. "Lord Reylan favors white, when he's not drinking with a meal."

"And your other dad?"

"Didn't care for wine," he answers, not thinking twice about it. "So Mother says."

Maredger sidesteps a pair of "Calerian Dancers", and twists his lip and lowers his eyebrows, but still seems to be smiling under it all. There's something about seeing that much cleavage at once can drive a man to strange facial expressions. "Ah, right. When he was last over he brought his own. Vile stuff. The kind sailors drink to show off."

Lucian refrained from commenting on Maredger generally being all talk when it came to alcohol, and took that comment with a grain of salt. "What's it made from?"

"Some Mainland crop," Maredger spits, remembering it. "Very north Mainland, like where he's from."

"Can't be that far north if it's from where he's from."

"North's relative." He's still smiling, despite the holes in his argument, mostly because he doesn't care if he's wrong on the fine points or not. "It's a mountain drink for mountain people. My dad said as much when he tasted it."

Lucian hears "mountain" as "high altitude" and doesn't know whether to agree or not. This particular waltz ends, with a whimper, then a bang, and then applause. He stops a moment to glance back at the dance floor, nods politely at some girl he knows--well, presumably some girl he knows, she's dressed up as a Blade Bunny, eye-patch and everything, and it's rather hard to tell with half a face. It's half a rather nice face, though, and he nods politely regardless. Perhaps after some red wine, he decides, he'll take advantage of this whole "masquerade" thing. There are probably better things to do than waltz, and definitely better things to do than sit around and drink with a guy dressed up like a Harmonian Bishop, even if the red wine is really quite good.

A new song begins, and it's yet another waltz. This one is up to the tempo of a music box, a real jig. "It really never ends," Lucian mutters, turning away from the dance floor once he hears the music. The swinging brown branches of his mask narrowly miss the shoulders of someone in black, and Lucian notices, and apologizes, but doesn't bother looking up.

The dragon-servant scoffs and moves on. He has little idea what prompted him to check up on Silverberg's spawn, but the thought occurred to him and so he heeded it. How fast these maggots grow, he thinks, and how little it actually matters that they do. They get large enough to make their limbs take effort to sever in less than two decades. The dragon-servant distinctly remembers when that particular whelp was small enough to crush with one hand.

Fleetingly, he recalls precisely why he bothers. His tenure with this Silverberg will eventually end, though it's already been longer than with any other, and this spawn, or this spawn's spawn, will probably be the next to whittle away at the debt. It wasn't as if any of the other branch of the family was going to, not after all the dragon-servant had done in Silverberg's name to get the rest of the spawn as far away from the continent-chain as possible. Perhaps they were insurance, or perhaps they were annoyance. It didn't matter to the dragon-servant as long as he got his due. And from the looks of it, this particular Silverberg was going to burn down as much of that house as possible--his sacrifices said as much.

He knows that Silverberg's direct spawn isn't going to go into the family business of starting, exacerbating, and, sometimes, ending, wars. He knows that Silverberg agrees with him. He's fairly sure that's one of the contributing factors to their being here tonight, but Silverberg's more complicated than the other maggots. If the dragon-servant allows himself to be arrogant, which he does, he presumes that Silverberg's started to think like him. After all, they've spent a lot of time together in maggot-years, and pretty soon Silverberg's limbs are going to get easy to sever again.

He tunes out the music--it's easy--and checks the dance floor to see if Silverberg's mate is still out there. She is, in her pile of feathers and cloth the color of a hanged man's fingernails, but she isn't dancing. In fact, she's in the process of leaving, looking around as if she's lost something other than her chance to _not_ play Silverberg's game.

The dragon-servant smiles. Fortunately, no one cares enough to look at him to get perturbed by the curl of his lips into the teeth of the mask. He chuckles to himself, lets the foolish woman leave the dance floor, and goes to deal with the man he's supposed to kill tonight.

-+-

The rain of Iluya, these days, bears more resemblance to the ocean than the ship. What was once the predictable and deserved outcome of catastrophic folly, easily mapped and planned around, has become as fickle as the weathercocks it mutilates. It is ubiquitous, yes, but not constant. It is as if some nights, the heavens weep, and other nights they bawl, and nights like this they launch into a homicidal rage and the tears disappear in favor of the fireworks. The rain, tonight, is an afterthought, a mist, but the sky is shouting expletives that would make the surliest pirate blush.

She knows why her ex-husband does not hate the rain. He confessed it to her, under duress, late in their engagement but before their marriage.

"Milord," she begins, with a jaunty familiarity that mocks any formality that would have been due. "You dance so well." She eyes the silver cane he had been carrying, resting in the shadowed corner of the great stone ledge alongside him, the prop's wielder as still and painfully vertical as it.

He knows her vocal signals--she is not incapable of treachery, he wouldn't have chosen her if she had been--and plays along. "As do you, milady. With such enthusiasm," he amends, when the sky protests his obvious lie.

"Milord flatters me," she says, joining him where he stands. The stone awning drips despondently with the viscous gatherings of rain and dirt, thick and dark against the ever-starless sky as they fall. Below them are three stories of stonemasonry, fit for the star-crossed lovers of yore to hurls themselves from in protest of filial piety. At the base of that, there are pikes of jagged and uncut rock, and water uncertain whether or not it is meant to be sand. Behind them, they can't hear the waltz if either bothers trying, not that either desires to. The Masquerade, after all, is not for anonymous dancing.

Ilana rests her black-gloved hands on the ledge of grey stone, beside his. She looks up through her false face of feathers and pearls at his of scales, and loses track of his natural eyes in favor of the emeralds. "Perhaps milord will flatter me further," she says, with a touch more feigned innocence than she intended, "with time beyond those short measures?"

She knows the words will not make him smile, and so does not bother maintaining her glance up at his face. She keeps her eyes on the lightning as it cracks over their heads, and when it fades in favor of the thunder she breathes in the noise, closing her eyes and moistening her lips with the dense, humid air.

The sky quakes with the noise, refreshing and reassuring in its majesty, until a delicate, dull pain shoots up Ilana's right wrist. Her gasp cuts off her reverie and her frail chest heaves but her eyes remain closed, testimony to how much she viscerally understands. She feels the pressure between the bones in her arm, no sharper than it had been on the dance floor, nothing but a signal. She swallows the rest of the air she meant to and tries to listen to her heart pounding, but the sound is drowned out by the sky's tantrum like everything else.

Albert tightens the grip on her wrist and draws a finger lightly across the sharp lower bones of it, closer to her hand. She remembers why he left her, and effectively they each other, and considers how petty that seems now. There is no outside world at a masquerade, because everyone summarily decides that it no longer exists. And the waltzes and wine do nothing to rein in reality or reinforce the existence of a past. She stands there and lets him touch her through their gloves, and wonders what Reylan is doing and whether he'd care.

"Presumptuous of you, stranger," she whispers, attempting to dismiss her thoughts with undue coquettishness.

"It was you who begged my flattery," he replies, his mask ever-resolute staring over the frothy ocean.

She smiles, and does not look up to see whether he is either. "I stand corrected," she says, and reaches her free hand up to her mouth. She rests her gloved fingertips on her lower lip, as if to impede her speech, and looks down at them over the feathers of her mask. She can feel her square-cut nail through the cloth of the glove and wonders if the situation is only this exhilarating because it's illicit.

With a shrug, she bites down lightly on the cloth over her middle finger and pries the long glove off. It is slow, slightly awkward work, but the meaning of the gesture is more important than how it looks. It is, like the fingers digging into her wrist, a signal. The gesture is made difficult when he apparently takes note of it, and stops caressing her wrist. She glances up at him, sidelong, and while the mask is still forward she can just barely see his eyes through the snake's snout.

She takes the glove out of her teeth and wonders, as always, if he ever loved her.

-+-

If one wishes to categorize the lords of Iluya, and indeed of all the Island Federation, one will have trouble comparing them to ships and oceans. They are a mixed bag, as any group of men will be upon consideration; some are distinguished captains, like their forefathers, some tradesmen, some men of lesser import subsisting on the legacies of their ancestors. One might argue that the aristocracy of any country will follow this pattern, once geographical quirks and genealogical predilections have been taken into account.

To generalize, the lords of Iluya, these days, are sailors one and all. It has always been this way, and will continue to fall this way until there ceases to be a need for ships with which to traverse the ocean. Whether each individual lord is a military man, a businessman, or effectively a merman, he is a man of the sea. It is the air he breathes, the wine he drinks, the rod his father disciplined him with as a boy, and the ichor with which he impregnates his women.

They're a salty lot.

Deep-sea ore made Lord Constantin Reylan's great grandfather a phenomenally rich man. Of course, though, the entrepreneur had been a rich man to begin with, just not a _phenomenally_ rich one. The founder of this branch was the third son in his generation of the long-standing family, exempt from patrimony but not immune to ambition. He is quite dead, of course, and long dead, as are his son and his son's son. The fourth in direct male line, namely Constantin, is alive, well, and deserving of both qualifications in the eyes of most who deal with him.

At the moment, the extent to which he is being "dealt" with is by the slightly capernoited and tight-bodiced girl diddling with the antennae on his mantor-mask. They are fashioned from long, dark blue feathers held stiff with lacquer and pulverized shells, like what warriors from Falena use instead of rank pips, and the saucer-sized eyes of the makeshift insect are carved from dark ore mined by his own company. He laughs, and the feather-tails catch on his short beard. "I can't believe your father let you drink that much."

"Er..." the girl mutters ungracefully, then flicks the antenna and is amused again.

Constantin sighs. "Nelly." He tosses his head, perhaps in disbelief, but the result is that long tendrils flick back and forth and the girl's giggling is only encouraged. He grips her shoulder with a gloved hand and wonders how on earth she gets away with it. "Nelly," he says again, louder, trying to get her to look up and discern whether she is lucid.

It is difficult to see her eyes through the mask--she is a cat tonight, and the eyes are slanted and ringed with thick stripes of onyx--but her pale brown irises roll and shudder a bit like porridge just about to boil. Constantin is worried, but not very worried, and holds his hand on her shoulder. "Nelly," he says, a third time, "he didn't _let_ you, did he."

"Father's off with something," the cat-masked girl says, smiling lazily under the striped leather. "Something with breasts." As if to emphasize, her eyes flicker down at her own abundant cleavage, and she resumes her quiet laughter.

"Good for Peter," Constantin says. He tries to usher Nelly closer to the wall and the row of chairs against it, to make sure she doesn't trip over her skirts and the long tail attached to them, though he expects that sooner or later she's going to go back to enjoying herself. He swears to himself that she's really a proper match for his stepson, when she isn't drunk. A bit old, perhaps, but then, the boy tends to think a good decade ahead of himself at times.

He manages to edge Nelly about eight feet before someone steps on the tail of her dress and she lurches forward, her chest hammering into the higher part of Constantin's stomach--for a girl of thirteen, it _is_ awfully large--and sends him backward a step. Someone stops them reeling with a hand on Constantin's back, and once he's settled on his feet the lord turns around to thank the good Samaritan.

It is one of his own attendants--Miles--dressed, as all the Reylan attendants are tonight, in eerie metal shells of masks, covering three quarters of the face (with only the right cheek bared), slate-grey and carved with the house crest. The Reylan sigil, before Constantin's great grandfather, had been a stingray, arching skyward; after the ore business had kicked off, it had become a stingray flayed over an anchor.

Constantin thanks his man, and again checks over Nelly to make sure the girl is standing, which she is.

"Sir," the servant says, not paying attention to the situation at all, "it's Brown."

"What about him?"

"He'll probably draw sword in about two minutes if we don't stop him."

Constantin nods curtly, deciding not to curse, and looks down at Nelly--who seems slightly more cogent than she did when she was batting around his mask's antennae. "Nelly," he says, for the fourth time, "go find Loosh, all right?"

"But Uncle--"

"He's probably just as drunk as you are," Constantin jokes, in a singsong way that has a historical precedent of getting rabbits into traps. "See if you can't get him talking about his latest project."

Under the cat-mask, the girls' lips and chin wrinkle into a scheming smile. She backs away from Constantin, adjusts her bodice (to expose more of her chest, actually, not that Constantin is paying attention anymore), and is sauntering, swishing the tail of her dress in search of her step-cousin, almost before Constantin and Miles have started on their beeline for the exit.

Constantin adjusts the mantor-mask as he walks, and demands, "What happened."

"I'm not rightly sure," Miles says, sidestepping a couple embracing against a tapestried wall. "He was already arguing when I stepped in. They took it outside of their own accord."

"Bless them," Constantin snaps, adjusting the insect-wings attached to his coat. "Any idea who?"

"Head-to-toe black, two swords."

"From the neck up, Miles, there are at least four dozen people here wearing black."

"I'm pretty sure he's not money, sir."

"That doesn't help." Constantin curses, again silently, that he'd allowed the guards to take his crossbow. "Two swords?"

"Two swords," Miles says, because at this point he is walking briskly _behind_ Constantin and nodding would be useless.

"Who do we know who keeps servants with two swords?" Constantin ducks under the fan of a man's peacock feathers, narrowly dodges a running bevy of teenagers immediately afterward, and is about ready to punch a wall by now. "I swear to the grandfather of all Leviathans I'm planking Brown."

Miles refrains from commenting.

Another waltz ends, and another round of applause begins, and two thoughts barrel at Constantin from opposite sides. The first involves where his wife is and who is watching her if Brown's in a fight and Miles is following him. The second involves servants that carry more than one sword and the men who hire them.

The musicians start playing in common time. Constantin curses like a sailor.

-+-

And if the lords of Iluya are sailors one and all, their ladies are second to the sea.

Albert still has not taken off his coat, though it and his scarf are open to Ilana's hands and the salt air. His gloves are set atop hers on the stone ledge under the awning, staining a corpse-like tan in the scant rain and salt vapors that drift in on the heels of the savage lightning. His lips are bruising red like his hair from the way Ilana still kisses after all these years, desperate and irreverent. Time was, it lent him power, and even now the memories are fulfilling.

"Cricket," he calls her, weighing his hands into the bared skin on her back, over the ridges of her spine. She presses closer to him and his back meets the wall, again, his coat and scarf wrinkling behind him. The back of his heavy mask clatters against the stone, just twice before Ilana worms her hands around his neck and inclines his lips to hers. Of course she remembers the name, of course she has missed hearing it. He knows that Lord Reylan doesn't call her after anything of the kind.

She digs her nails into his shoulder and knows there are better ways to prolong this, and wonders how long it has been since she heard that word. Her fingers creep under the rim of his mask, accidentally dragging the edge of one of her own mask's feathers, and her beak clashes against one of his emerald eyes. She knows the top of her dress is practically unnecessary at this point and can feel the cloth sliding down her back and him doing nothing to stop it. She feels indecent, and the indecency is as wonderful as the illicitness, the idea that any moment she could come to ruin and, possibly, so could he. Only the pressure of her breasts against his shirt is holding up her gown at this point and yes, she cares, but it ebbs and wanes like the tide four stories below.

"Remind me," she mutters against his lips when they part for air, "remind me why I signed those papers."

One of her sharp heels scrapes against the back of his calf, and he almost chokes on his reply. "To dissociate yourself from me," he says, and lets more of her dress slip out from under his palm.

She laughs, the way she had on the dance floor, and finds his left ear where the snake-mask bares it. "Of course, dear," she whispers, and bites the earring he still wears.

"It was effective, for a time," he breathes, digging his chin into her shoulder.

The metal clasp is cold against her tongue, jarring and as strange as ever, especially in how refreshing it feels. She can taste the half-dead skin under it where the posts have held for decades, right next to the faint pulse of his blood running under the cartilage. He is warmer than the metal in his ear, his hands slick against her back, and she imagines she's not the driest creature on land either. She kisses along the sharp of his chin--he's aged, she can tell, and it makes her happy--until she finds the corner of his lips again.

"Cricket," he whispers, the four swift and delicate motions of his lips and tongue close enough for her to feel the aspiration behind. The sky protests with cannon-fire and steam, ringing through the stone corridors of the mansion until the dance and intrigue drown them out. For a moment even the rain sounds, surpasses the mist and the waves like clanging swords, too few to be a battle but too many for a duel. Ilana kisses the man against the wall and dismisses the noise, losing herself in her own laughter and the slow, almost imperceptible descent of her bodice against the buttons of his open coat.

And then the dry rain--the sword-fighting--continues to pound.

The emerald eyes of Albert's mask are still and dulled by the rain, but something within them flickers. He is still as the wall behind him and the shadows between the scales of his mask thicken, deep outlines of black in the oyster-sheen. He tightens his hand around the falling fabric of Ilana's bodice and catches one sharp fingernail in an arc over her spine. She closes her teeth on his lower lip, and he smiles.

"You wouldn't dare!"

The words soar up from three stories of jagged granite down, between the thunder and the buzzing waves of the coast. The last of them is spat out with a low growl that betrays how afraid the speaker is. On the balcony, Ilana doesn't hear the yell under her ragged breathing. She's the only one who can possibly miss such a din.

The dragon-servant smirks lazily, bored and proud at how easy it had been. It had taken seven words--"I know where you hid the bodies"--and Lord Reylan's servant was beyond rational thought. His eyes are still wide like a horse's nostrils when one drives the spurs in flat perpendicular and an inch too far back.

Brown keeps on railing, the Reylan-house mask on his face as blunt-edged and grey as the sky. He goes on and on, something about revenge and pleading and other maggot-concerns. The dragon-servant tunes it out and listens behind him for his 'ally'. And sure enough, the sandy thuds of the other black-clad servant's feet, heavier than most maggots', get louder and louder.

"You'll want to put that down before your master gets here," the shark-masked man calls at Brown, with an edge to his voice that insinuates Brown _really_ wants to take no such action.

"I'll want to put _that_ down before my master gets here," he shouts, pointing his still peace-bound sword at the dragon-servant's chest. He staggers a little on the sand of the beach with the force of the gesture, and the carved sheathe of the blade bats scant remains of the lightning onto his mask and bare cheek. "You stay out of this!"

"I've already told your people," the shark-servant says, in his deep and tide-powered voice. "You put the blade down now and I won't tell them anything more."

The dragon-servant scoffs. "I will," he says, smiling where the mask ends. The distant thunder masks whether he laughs after as well, but it is not as if Brown cares.

"That's it," he says, and tears the white ribbon off his sword. "I die now, I rot in prison, at least I _tried_--"

"You're a damned fool," the shark-servant says, but the dragon-servant has already unbound both of his blades, somewhat gleefully. He's in Brown's face, swords whirling, almost before Brown's own sword is unsheathed. (The shark-servant smirks to himself, knowing how inconsequential the white ribbons were in the first place.) The dark armor and mask sneer in the scant, mist-broken light, sand flies up from their feet, lightning careens across the sky and the three blades right with it. Brown would have seen the poetry in it if he wasn't drunk and enraged. The shark-servant sees it, and would comment if he didn't have a role to play.

Brown screams and barrels his sword at the dragon-servant, kicking up a wake of dense and glassy sand on the upsweep. The dragon-servant bats the blade aside the way a cat would a bit of string, and hisses somewhere along the same lines. Brown is too disoriented to be frightened--well, frightened at the sound--even though he should be. Something in his soul knows he is being toyed with. In the fickle way such realizations do, it only makes him angrier.

They dart up and down the beach, Brown perpetually on the defensive, the dragon-servant a black blur with his golden braid and steel swords whipping through the dense salt air. The shark-servant scurries after them haltingly, checking over his sharp-armored shoulder for the next set of 'players' to arrive. He glares at the dragon-servant, who doesn't take note of it at all. The duel traces the shore, Brown's and the dragon-servant's boots tearing up the invading corps of seaweed in the froth on the shore. The dragon-servant stamps down hard on the corpse of a horseshoe crab and his swords blare over Brown's head--he barely ducks--in a silver arc.

That is the first glimpse Constantin gets of them, panting as he bolts out of the manor with Miles on his heels, his antennae flagging in his wake. The dueling servants are blurs of black and grey against the crags and the sea and Constantin grabs his cape in his elbow and tears over the sand, shouting at them (well, Brown specifically) to "Stop, damn you!"

The shark-servant grins, and steps aside to let the lord come barreling through. Whether he meant to leave his foot in the lord's path is entirely irrelevant.

Constantin braces himself with his elbow, thinking he'll fall. He's right, of course, but he catches himself on Brown's sword on the way down. The blade slashes deep into the lord's forearm. A blink later and the frayed blue cloth is dripping red. Only Constantin sees this.

Lightning roars through the sky with thunder on its heels. Together they drown out four screams and illuminate three smiles. Ilana, however, kisses Albert rather than let hers resonate.

-+-

Lucian is sailing. At this point, he's has had enough red wine to consider taking his step-cousin home to port. Consider, however, that three glasses ago he considered kissing Maredger--just to shut him up, granted, but he still considered it and made the mistake of telling Maredger so. Maredger's bound to be hanging that over his head for months.

Not that Lucian cares. It was some damned good red wine.

Nell is giggling. She's got her head on Lucian's left shoulder and the whiskers of her mask have made a few feeble attempts to shove themselves up his ear canal. He fancies plenty of people have made jokes about the cat caught up a tree. Maredger apparently had been waiting to do so all evening.

The three of them had found a place to sit down where they could watch the dancers, but Lucian had given up watching when he found out that so many bright colors swirling around made him dizzy. They had climbed off the dance floor to the balcony ring and sat on a dense, soft chaise under a pair of rune-lanterns that Lucian couldn't decide were meant to be white or yellow, but that didn't give much light to the area anyway. Maredger, sprawled on the chaise to his right, seems to be holding up all right, getting chatty with...well, someone only he can see, unless he still thinks he's talking to Lucian and Nell. As for Nell, well, Lucian doesn't think she was ever actually watching the dancers.

He knows his stepfather's a machinating old coot. Not as bad as his natural father, but still a machinating old coot. Of a less genocidal and more...well, just...

"Loosh?" The whiskers attack his ear again and the berries on his mask-branches jingle.

He answers with a vague prompting noise and stares up at the lanterns. Yellow, he decides. Maybe only because the shadows of his own mask are getting in his eyes, but still yellow.

Her chest vibrates against his upper arm. "Why did you come as a tree?"

"Grandfather Holly," he corrects. "They're from the mainland."

"Grandfather Holly, then," she muses, and bats one of his branches. "Because it's from the mainland?"

"Because it's an animal I can't stuff," he answers. "When they die, they get hollow and still and preserve themselves into wood. And when they look dead I can't fix them."

"Ever tried?"

"Yes."

"How'd you get one?"

"It got loose at a sideshow," Maredger interrupts, elbowing Lucian in the ribs, which dominoes Nell's head into the branches of the mask and subsequently cheek-first into Lucian's lap. "--Sorry," he adds when Lucian and Nell exclaim, mutter, glare at him, and scramble back to a more reasonable position in some fleeting combination. "But it got loose at a sideshow we were at on holiday. And I killed it. So they let me and Loosh keep it. But those things die like statues. I mean when they die they get like statues."

Lucian edges away from Nell, closes his legs, and reflects on what Maredger tactfully doesn't say about precisely how the thing got out of its cage. "Smelled good when it burned, though," he mutters, tossing his head when Nell's whiskers get him at the nape of his neck. Persistent thing, that. Cat up a tree.

He turns to look at Nell instead of the lights--white now--and gets an eyeful of the profile of her cleavage. "You killed it? How?" she asks, perched on her knees and hands, which are on Lucian's knees.

He's going to kill his stepfather, once he sobers up, he swears it.

"Well, Lucian helped," Maredger admits. "He dropped a net on it. And then I shot it in the eyes five or six times."

"Four," Lucian says.

"Wow..." Nell mouths.

The music clatters to a halt with a noise too artificial to be thunder. Wood splinters and women shriek and the whirling colors on the dance floor mesh into an abstract tableau. It's almost enough to completely obscure the sound of three swords ringing and dozens of people ducking for cover.

Maredger leaps to his feet and rushes to the railing. Lucian does the same, which involves shoving Nell down onto the chaise. He catches himself on the railing, finds the chaos, and realizes that he's not the only one who can't see it clearly.

There are two black man-sized and monster-fast blurs flying across the dance floor, swinging swords that Lucian can hardly see at all. One man is holding two of them, the other is--

"That's one of yours, isn't it?"

"I'm not blind, Redge, just drunk."

"It's Brown," Nell mutters from the chaise, smoothing out her dress and not looking. "Guess it didn't stay outside."

"You knew about this?" Lucian almost shouts, whipping around to face her.

"Not really."

"You _know_ what Brown gets like!"

"Uncle said he'd take care of it!"

Maredger gulps. "Loosh--"

There are few things in the world that can make Maredger en Keene shut himself up. At least one of them has just happened.

One of the black, sword-wielding blurs--Brown--crashes back-first into a tapestried pillar. The two swords belonging to his adversary spin through the air and shatter most of the bottles of red wine on the table they soar past before pinning Brown's sleeves to the pillar behind him. The blades drip with the pale purple wine but not a drop of blood. The adversary himself--Lucian recognizes him as his natural father's servant, Yuber--pulls himself to stand straight up, slower than all the chaos around him. He is masked as a fearsome black dragon with jagged, groping horns and no one wants to be caught within ten feet of him at the moment. His braid has grown since Lucian had last seen him.

"A doctor!" someone shouts, but the voice is stilted and spittle-raked. "That servant struck his own master!" the voice, deep and masculine, yells further in a choked lisp. The person with the voice--another one in black, a heavy-set and broad-shouldered shark--shoves his way through the crowd, carrying the head of an insect under one arm and pulling Constantin close behind him. Constantin is clutching at his arm, hastily bandaged with black cloth from the shark-servant's own shirt, pale and sweating with red lines across his forehead from the mask's interior.

Brown strains and tries to pry himself to his feet. "I didn't mean to, I swea--"

Like a shot, Yuber's boot is jammed into his throat. "I wouldn't speak if I was you," Yuber growls, and the words bolt up two stories and straight through Lucian's ears. "Maggot."

The word silences nearly everyone and everything. One probably won't be able to hear a pin drop or an eyebrow raise, but the gasp of Michel D'Boule is a relatively resonant noise.

"His wife!" Michel squeals. "Where is his wife?"

No one but Lucian has his eyes on the servant in the dragon-mask, standing in a hole in the crowd with his foot against Brown's neck. Even Lucian is uncertain whether the blond-braided man is smirking, or whether it is Lucian's drunk eyes conjuring up a nightmare from long ago.

Lucian shakes his head rapidly and shuts the noise of his mask's berries out of his ears. He presses himself off the railing and runs for the stairs, catching a branch against Nell's face as he goes. "Dad!" he yells, "Dad, are you all right?"

-+-

In a matter of minutes, the guards of the manor--reminded by the shark-servant--will have confiscated Brown's sword and locked it away. Yuber will remove his boot from Brown's throat before the man dies, but he will be unconscious and easily transported to the dungeons.

The guards will happen upon a middle-yeared couple as they wind through the halls and balconies on their way down, and tactfully look away. The noise the guards make, however, will be enough to stop the pair's revelry, and they will wonder where the music has gone. They will re-dress themselves hastily and return to the ball through separate entrances, but everyone will know what they had been doing, if not who with and where.

The good Samaritan in the shark-mask will be revealed as Modesto Koren, a rival of Constantin's from their youth, having fallen out of the aristocracy and made his way as a mercenary since their duel that had resulted in his biting off half of his own tongue. He will call all things square between him and Constantin and, after accepting his pay from Lord Silverberg, disappear.

Constantin's wound will be appraised as nothing serious, treated quickly, and be almost entirely dealt with by the time Ilana is finally at his side. They will not speak to each other for days, and Ilana will not even know that Constantin has taken ill until two nights after the wound begins to fester.

Upon explicit request, the guards will remember that they locked Brown's sword away. They will appraise it and determine that it was poisoned, and that the poison is of the sort to produce the symptoms that Constantin is displaying. Brown will plead ignorance. Upon the recollection of the masses of who rushed to Constantin's aid and who did not, Ilana will be blamed.

Despite the efforts of his physicians, Constantin will die. Knowing this, the lord will pen his will, leaving the company and the fortunes to his devoted stepson and disinheriting his wife. Brown will be beheaded in his cell. Ilana will go to a women's prison for only as long as her ill health can take it, and die with seven years of her sentence remaining.

Lucian Silverberg will become a phenomenally rich man and one of the most coveted bachelors in the Island Federation. He will manage the company effectively enough, but shall soon enough tire of the sea and marry a girl from the mainland, tall and red-haired like his mother.

-+-+-+-


End file.
